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Friday, April 1, 2016

Microreview [video game]: John Romero's Daikatana by Ion Storm

The Time-hopping Classic

Daikatana is mediocre at its very best. There is simply no better way to put it.
The level design is uninspired. The sounds are mostly weak and
inappropriate. The flow of the game is choppy. The texture work is busy
and looks as though entirely too much detail was crammed into
resolutions far too small.

For a good indicator of how the
entire game plays out, look no further than the very first level. It
stands out as an example of almost everything wrong with this game. It
takes place in a futuristic swamp, not exactly the most exciting place
ever. It is painted in primarily two colors; green and gray. The first
enemies you fight are (and I'm not joking) robotic mosquitoes, robotic
frogs, and robotic alligators. They all behave in the same manner; hop,
fly, or crawl directly at you and attempt to make a melee attack. Your
first weapon is the ion blaster; an ugly green and gray pistol that
looks like it's a bundle of tubes and wires all taped together. Shots
from the ion blaster ricochet off of walls and explode in water for no
particular purpose. Since you spend some time in the water because you
are in a swamp, it is quite a surprise to be burned by your own weapon
when you attempt to fight something there. You are left to fight
alligators and frogs in water with your fists. There is one path through
the level from beginning to end and it is not particularly interesting
or exciting. This tepid start is how the entire game plays out.

Off to a great start here. The whole first episode looks like this.

Early
in the game you are cursed with two AI companions. Had these companions
any semblance of intelligence, they may have been useful. As they
stand, they are walking liabilities. They get stuck in terrain, they get
stuck in doors, they fall way behind so that when you are trying to
exit a level, you waste time waiting on them to catch up. They can wield
weapons but since they are often far behind you, they either do not get
to the firefight in time to contribute in any meaningful capacity, or
they end up shooting you in the back. Babysitting them is a miserable
experience.

Is that supposed to be a minotaur?

There is an experience point system in which you
can level up your amount of damage per attack, speed of fire, speed of
movement, jumping ability, and total health. Of these, the only one of
any real use is increasing jumping ability. It is the only one that has
any tangible benefits as it allows you to access some secret areas that
you would not otherwise be able to reach. If you use the Daikatana, it
takes your experience points to level itself up. Increasing the level of
the Daikatana is not really useful. It attacks faster and does more
damage, but it begins to glow and spark and these effects end up taking
up more screen real estate than they're worth. The Daikatana is useless
in any ranged fight and most of the enemies in the game are melee
focused, so you can put yourself at a tactical advantage by using
whatever your period specific pistol is and leaving the Daikatana
alone.

As I described the ion blaster, so many of the other
weapons in the game tend to bite you just as often as they do your
enemies. The C4 launcher in the first episode is absolutely crippling to
yourself more than Mishima's forces. It fires sticky proximity mines
that explode in a large radius if anything comes near them, including
yourself and other prox mines. Since enemies are often too dumb to
follow you once you're out of sight, it is impossible to use this weapon
to set any traps and it becomes a dangerously unhelpful grenade
launcher. In the second episode, you get the hammer of Hades. It does
healthy amounts of damage when charged, but places that damage right
below your feet so you feel its power also. It'll even nuke your AI
sidekicks if they get too close, which send you straight to the game
over screen. The weapons in episode three are not particularly good or
bad, and, in a surprising turn, the guns in episode four are actually
fun to use. Episode four, however, contains one of the most personally
dangerous weapons in the entire game; the metamaser. It is a thrown
proximity turret that shoots out lasers at anything that comes near it,
including you! However, its range is so great, and there are basically
no encounters with anything more than one or two enemies at a time, and
it explodes violently after a short period of time. It is far more
dangerous than useful.

The writing is worse than most video games, which is saying a lot.

The level design can only be described
as painful. As in the first level, there is typically only one path and
it is rarely an interesting one. Platforming abounds and it is about as
fun as pulling teeth. In episode two, there is an inordinately large
area through which five runes are hidden. The player is rarely pointed
in the direction of each rune and it becomes a long and boring game of
hide and seek. While most levels took me only twenty minutes at most to
complete, I spent over an hour on this area alone, and that does not
include time lost due to deaths. At the end of episode four, there is a
series of instant death platforming sections that serve only to drive
the player insane. It is unfathomable to believe that someone at some
point in time thought that these areas were a good idea, or even fun.

Story
in this game comes only through long and boring cutscenes. Even though
you carry two AI companions with you through most of the game, they
rarely speak to each other or contribute anything to say about what is
going on in the game. All meaningful dialog is contained within
cutscenes that run too long. Thankfully they are skippable at any time.

If you skip all of the cutscenes, you miss gold like this.

There
is no avoiding it; Daikatana was not a good game when it was released,
and it does not get better with age. If you are feeling nostalgic, as I
was, watch a playthrough on Youtube. Do not play it. This game is far more trouble than it is worth.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 2/10

Bonuses: +1 there's a lot to play!

Penalties: -1 none of it is good

Nerd Coefficient: 2/10 (really really bad)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014